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I wanted to show a LightSwitch application running on Windows 8 at our last Orlando .Net Users Group meeting, but I didn’t get a chance to work out the kinks that Windows 8 presented in time. It being Saturday today, and the good football games not starting until right about now (3:30 PM EDT, or GMT-5), I took some time this afternoon and worked it out.

It’s rather simple actually. I had published the application from my Windows 7 workstation, copied the Publish folder over to the Windows 8 installation that lives on a bootable .vhd on my laptop (this is the approach I used), and followed the instructions in the install.htm file that’s included. I’m actually fibbing about completely following the instructions. Since I had not attempted to install LightSwitch on Windows 8, I skipped the last step.

I ran the database creation script from an elevated command prompt as instructed. To get to an elevated command prompt, you have to right-click the Command Prompt placed on your Windows 8 Metro Start Screen by Visual Studio 11 Developer Edition, and select Run As Administrator by clicking on the Advanced charm in the App Bar that appears (or do it manually if you did not install the full Visual Studio 11). I verified that the web.config in the Application Files folder was set up correctly. But I did NOT run the command line using the Security Admin tool that comes with LightSwitch (Microsoft.LightSwitch.SecurityAdmin.exe). Of course, the application timed out connecting to the database.

Being a bit of a hacker, I wondered (not out loud mind you) whether or not I could just copy the Tools folder where the LightSwitch Security Admin tool lives over to my Windows 8 installation and run it. Guess what? I could, you can, it runs, and my LightSwitch application started right up. I set up the application with Windows Authentication; if you use Forms authentication, you will need to supply a password. I had to put my full name and the path to the web.config in quotes.

Hope this helps. I’m sure the LightSwitch team is already working on making deployment onto Windows 8 and the new release of SQL Server Express much easier.